Mired

How did we—not just Americans but human beings in general—come to be? Opinions differ, but for most of recorded history the consensus view was that people were made out of mud. Also, that the mud was originally turned into people by a being or beings who themselves resembled people, only bigger, more powerful, and longer-lived, often immortal. The early Chinese theorized that a lonely goddess, pining for company, used yellow mud to fashion the first humans. According to the ancient Greeks, Prometheus sculpted the first man from mud, after which Athena breathed life into him. Mud is the man-making material in the creation stories of Mesopotamian city-states, African tribes, and American Indian nations.

The mud theory is still dominant in the United States, in the form of the Book of Genesis, whose version of the origin of our species, according to a recent Gallup poll, is deemed true by forty-five per cent of the American public. Chapter 2, in verses 6 and 7, puts it this way:

But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground. And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

Mud is not mentioned by name, but you’d have to be a pretty strict Biblical literalist not to infer that mud is what you get when you add water to dust.

A competing theory is that people, along with the rest of the earth’s animals and plants, evolved over billions of years, beginning as extremely simple organisms and, via the accumulation of the tiny fraction of random mutations that turn out to be useful, developing into more complex ones. This view has gained many adherents since it was conceived, a century and a half ago, by Charles Darwin. It commands solid majorities in most of the developed world, and, thanks to the overwhelming evidence for its validity, has the near-unanimous support of scientists everywhere. Here in the United States, according to Gallup, it is subscribed to by about one-third of the populace—still running second to mud, but too large a market share to ignore altogether, especially in some of the battleground states.

On the one hand this, on the other hand that. George W. Bush is not normally the type to endorse shilly-shallying, but this time he went for it. At a “round table” with Texas reporters, the President was asked to comment on “what seems to be a growing debate over evolution versus intelligent design” and whether “both should be taught in public schools.”

THE PRESIDENT: I think—as I said, harking back to my days as my governor—both you and Herman are doing a fine job of dragging me back to the past. (Laughter.) Then, I said that, first of all, that decision should be made to local school districts, but I felt like both sides ought to be properly taught. Q: Both sides should be properly taught? THE PRESIDENT : Yes, people—so people can understand what the debate is about. Q: So the answer accepts the validity of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution? THE PRESIDENT : I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought, and I’m not suggesting—you’re asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, and the answer is yes.

Looked at one way, this colloquy is an occasion for national shame, albeit with a whiff of the risible: here is our country’s leader, the champion-in-chief of educational standards, blandly equating natural science and supernatural supposition as “different schools of thought.” Looked at another way, it represents progress of a sort. Twenty-five years ago, Ronald Reagan, then the Republican candidate for President, endorsed the teaching of “creationism”; five years ago, George W. Bush did the same. “Creationism” holds that dinosaurs and people coexisted, and that the fossil record is a product of Noah’s flood. Next to that, “intelligent design” represents a scientific advance, or a tactical retreat, or maybe just the evolutionary process at work. I.D. recognizes that the age of the universe is measured in billions, not thousands, of years; that fossils are evidence, not divine tricks to test believers’ faith; and that organisms change over time, sometimes via natural selection. This is tantamount to an admission that the Genesis story is poetry, not history; allegory, not fact.

But I.D.—whose central (and easily refuted) talking point is that certain structures of living things are too intricate to have evolved without the intervention of an “intelligent designer” (and You know who You are)—enjoys virtually no scientific support. It is not even a theory, in the scientific sense, because it is untestable and unsupportable by empirical evidence. It is a last-ditch skirmish in a misguided war against reason that cannot be won and, for religion’s sake as well as science’s, should not be fought. If the President’s musings on it were an isolated crotchet, they would hardly be worth noting, let alone getting exercised about. But they’re not. They reflect an attitude toward science that has infected every corner of his Administration. From the beginning, the Bush White House has treated science as a nuisance and scientists as an interest group—one that, because it lies outside the governing conservative coalition, need not be indulged. That’s why the White House-sometimes in the service of political Christianism or ideological fetishism, more often in obeisance to baser interests like the petroleum, pharmaceutical, and defense industries-has altered, suppressed, or overriden scientific findings on global warming; missile defense; H.I.V./ AIDS; pollution from industrial farming and oil drilling; forest management and endangered species; environmental health, including lead and mercury poisoning in children and safety standards for drinking water; and non-abstinence methods of birth control and sexually-transmitted-disease prevention. It has grossly misled the public on the number of stem-cell lines available for research. It has appointed unqualified ideo_logues to scientific advisory committees and has forced out scientists who persist in pointing out inconvenient facts. All this and more has been amply documented in reports from congressional Democrats and the Union of Concerned Scientists, in such leading scientific publications as Nature, Scientific American, Science, and The Lancet, and in a new book, “The Republican War on Science,” by the science journalist Chris Mooney.

Mooney’s book is more judicious than its move-product title, which, as he acknowledges in an opening chapter, is not meant to apply to moderate Republicans past (such as Dwight D. Eisenhower) or present (such as John McCain). Anyway, a few small fissures are beginning to appear in the stone wall. Bill Frist, M.D., the Senate Majority Leader, has broken with the White House on stem-cell research. The White House science adviser, John H. Marburger III, evidently embarrassed by his boss’s evolutionary equivocations, told the Times that “intelligent design is not a scientific concept.” And the cover story in the current National Journal, a well-informed and relentlessly nonpartisan Washington weekly, reports that growing numbers of Republican politicians and corporate chieftains “who once dismissed as unproven the idea that the burning of fossil fuels is causing a harmful rise in Earth’s temperature have now concluded that global warming is real—and very dangerous.” As a result, the magazine says, “Advocates of muscular gove_rnmental efforts to slow or reverse global warming predict that the United States will eventually take strong action—but they doubt that such action will come on Bush’s watch.” In this White House, science’s name is mud. And, unlike those intelligent designers in the sky, all this crowd knows how to do is sling it.

Hendrik Hertzberg is a senior editor and staff writer at The New Yorker. He regularly blogs about politics.